There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with controlling significant portions of the world's resources. I have sat with it in hotel suites in Milano, in villas in Bali, in apartments overlooking Los Angeles where the art on the walls cost more than most people will earn in several lifetimes. The loneliness does not look like loneliness. It looks like optimization. It looks like a calendar managed by three assistants, a body maintained by personal trainers and longevity clinics, a mind sharpened by executive coaches and Ketmain. It looks like having solved the problem of life.
The people who find me have usually solved every problem. They have access to the best psychiatrists, coaches, the most exclusive retreats, the most sophisticated biohacking protocols. They have tried plant medicine with shamans who flew in from Peru. They have done silent meditation retreats where nobody knew who they were. They have read the books, done the programs, optimized the optimization.
And still something is wrong. Something they cannot name and cannot fix and cannot buy their way out of. They contact me because someone they trust, usually someone who will never admit to knowing me, has told them that I work differently. That I see something others do not see. That I am not impressed by them and not afraid of them and not interested in what they can do for me.
This is already unusual. Almost everyone in their lives wants something from them. The assistants, the executives, the friends, the lovers, the therapists, the coaches, all of them are performing. The performance may be genuine affection, genuine competence, genuine care. But it is still a performance calibrated to someone with power. The power warps every relationship. It creates a field around them where authentic friction becomes impossible.
I am not interested in their power. I am interested in what lives beneath it.
There is a reason the talking cure was invented for the bourgeoisie. The poor have problems that can be named: hunger, illness, exploitation. The wealthy have problems that cannot be named because naming them would reveal that wealth has not solved them. The unnameable festers. It becomes neurosis, obsession, the particular modern sickness of having everything and feeling nothing.
What the early psychoanalysts understood, and what the luxury wellness industry has largely forgotten, is that insight does not come from more resources. It comes from confrontation with what resources cannot touch. You can buy comfort, protection, optimization, control. You can curate your environment so completely that nothing unwanted ever enters. But insight comes from the opposite direction. Insight comes from what you cannot control, cannot curate, cannot optimize away.
The problem is that people in the technocratic elite, the ones trained to engineer outcomes at scale, can spend so long curating, measuring, and optimizing that they lose access to anything else. The controller becomes the whole personality. Underneath is a vast, unprocessed wilderness: decades of grief, rage, loneliness, desire, and shame. But the controller sits on it like a lid on a pressure cooker. Therapy becomes another control system. Meditation becomes another control system. Even plant medicine can become a managed experience, intense but still contained.
What I offer is the removal of control. Not gradually. Not gently. The removal of every structure that allows them to maintain the performance of having their life handled.
Let me describe what this looks like in practice.
A man arrives. He runs a fund that manages more money than the GDP of several small countries. He is in his late forties, fit, articulate, used to being the most intelligent person in any room. He has come because his marriage is failing and his children barely speak to him and he has started having panic attacks at three in the morning. He has tried everything. Nothing has worked. Someone gave him my name.
We do not meet in a luxury resort. We meet in a location I have chosen, sometimes beautiful, sometimes deliberately stark. There is no concierge. No spa menu. No private butler asking if he would like sparkling or still. This absence is already disorienting for someone who has not experienced an unmanaged environment in years. He does not know what to do with himself when no one is attending to his preferences.
I explain that we will be working with practices from an ancient Shakta Tantra lineage from West Bengal. I explain that there will be other people present, actors I have cast specifically for him. I explain that some practices will be done nude. I explain that he will be asked to do things that feel uncomfortable, strange, perhaps absurd. I explain that he will not be in control.
He nods. He thinks he understands. He does not understand.
The actors I bring into these retreats are not wealthy. They are artists, dancers, therapists, porn actors, seekers, sometimes homeless. I select them carefully, matching their energetic profiles to what the client needs. Sometimes I choose people they want. Sometimes I choose people they resist. Sometimes I choose people so outside their usual orbit that the client's pattern recognition has nothing to hook into.
This is not random. In the traditional left-handed tantric rituals of India, practitioners would deliberately include people from outside their caste, a transgression that was both social and spiritual. The point was not rebellion for its own sake. The point was that proximity to the forbidden disrupts the defended self. It creates cracks in the armor.
My clients live inside an invisible caste system. They associate almost exclusively with people like themselves, other founders, other executives, other members of the same clubs and conferences and private islands. Everyone around them has been vetted, filtered, optimized for compatibility. They have not been in uncontrolled proximity to an unvetted human being in years.
The actors are unvetted. They have not signed up to manage the client's comfort. They are being paid, yes, but not to perform deference. They are being paid to be fully present in their own energy, raw, untamed, unpredictable. One actor might have the chaotic vitality of someone who has never had to suppress themselves for professional advancement. Another might have a quality of stillness that comes from years of practice the client has never encountered. A third might simply be someone who does not care about money or status and therefore meets the client without the usual filters.
This alone can be shattering. To be seen by someone who has no investment in your power. To be in a room with people whose nervous systems are not organized around managing your reactions. The client often does not know what to do. His usual scripts, the charm, the authority, the strategic warmth, do not produce the expected responses. He is just a person in a room with other people. Probably for the first time in decades.
But this is only the beginning.
The practices themselves are designed to amplify what is already happening. One of the many practises I deliver during the Sensual Liberation Retreats is called Manonasha, translated as the destruction of mind, involves sitting face to face with a partner, often nude, focusing on a point in space between you while performing specific breathing patterns and subtle movements. You cannot hide in this configuration. Every thought you have suppressed about desire, shame, inadequacy, longing, all of it surfaces. The presence of another person, another nervous system, another pair of eyes, makes suppression impossible.
With my wealthy clients, what surfaces first is often not what they expect. They expect their sexual issues, their relationship wounds, their childhood traumas. These arise, certainly. But beneath them is something else. Something they have never allowed themselves to feel.
Not irritation. Not frustration. Not the controlled anger of someone negotiating a deal. I mean rage, primal, wordless, murderous rage at having had to perform for so long. At having had to be competent, strategic, optimized, handled, managed, appropriate. At never being allowed to simply scream.
The people around them have never permitted this. The board does not want to see the CEO scream. The family does not want to see the patriarch lose control. The therapist subtly redirects the anger toward insight and integration. Everyone in their lives has been managing their emotional expression for so long that they have forgotten what unmanaged emotion feels like.
I do not manage it. When the rage surfaces, I let it surface. The actors become, in a sense, the targets, not because they deserve anger but because they are there, they are real, they are bodies that can receive what has been accumulating for decades without being destroyed by it. This is their function. To be the containers. To be screamed at, hated, raged against. To receive the disgust that has been fermenting beneath the performance of equanimity.
One female client, I will not say who, spent an entire afternoon screaming. Not words. Just sound. A howl that had been waiting forty years to emerge. The actors sat with her, witnessed her, did not flinch, did not try to calm her down. When she finally stopped, she looked at her own hands as if she had never seen them before.
I have watched this sequence enough times to know its rhythm. The rage comes first because it is closest to the surface, pressing against the lid of control. When it finally releases, there is often a period of emptiness. The client does not know who he is without the rage. The controller has been managing the rage for so long that when the rage goes, the controller has nothing to do.
This is a dangerous moment. Some people try to reconstitute the old structure immediately. They reach for their phone, their schedule, their habits of optimization. They want to turn what has happened into a story they can manage, "I had a breakthrough, I released some anger, now I am healed." I do not allow this. The practices continue. The exposure continues. The emptiness must be inhabited.
And then, beneath the emptiness, something else appears.
I hesitate to name it because the naming makes it sound smaller than it is. But I have seen it enough times to trust what I am seeing. When the rage has emptied out, when the controller has exhausted itself, when the performance has finally cracked beyond repair, what remains is a kind of love. Not romantic love. Not even spiritual love in the way that term is usually meant. Something more like the substrate of the person. The thing they were before they learned to perform. The wanting that precedes all the strategies for getting what you want.
They become children again. Not childish, there is no regression, no helplessness. But the quality of presence shifts. The sophistication drops away. The face changes. I have watched billionaires weep with the uncomplicated grief of a five-year-old who has been left alone too long. I have watched them reach toward the actors with a nakedness that has nothing to do with physical nudity. I have watched the superiority dissolve, not as defeat but as relief. The exhausting performance of being better, smarter, more successful than everyone else simply stops.
What remains is someone who wants to be loved. That is all. The most basic human thing. The thing that all the money and power and optimization was ultimately trying to secure, through strategies so complex that the original wanting got buried.
When I see this happen, I know the work is reaching its target. The parallel self, the one that has been growing through the practices, through the confrontation with what was forbidden, has finally become strong enough to hold the whole person. Not the persona. The person.
I should say something about why they often do not speak of me afterward.
It is not because the work failed. Usually it is because the work succeeded. They came to me in crisis, stripped themselves bare in front of strangers, screamed and wept and dissolved, and then they returned to their lives. The lives still involve boards and deals and public personas. The lives still require a certain performance.
But they know now what lives beneath the performance. They have seen it. They cannot unsee it.
To speak of this publicly would require admitting that they needed help. It would require admitting that the optimization project had failed. It would require admitting that they sat nude in a room with actors and screamed until their throat was raw. The admission would not fit the story they need to maintain, the story of competence, of having everything handled, of being a certain kind of person.
So they do not speak of me. This is not a complaint. I understand the necessity. The work lives in them whether or not they acknowledge its source. The changes in their relationships, their decisions, their presence, these continue to unfold for years. The effects are visible to those who know them well. But the cause remains private.
This is appropriate. What happens in the ritual space is not meant for public consumption. The traditional left-handed practices were always secret, always conducted in small circles, never discussed with outsiders. The secrecy was not shame. It was protection, of the practices themselves, of the practitioners, of the forces that were invoked.
I protect my clients in the same way. Their breakdowns are held in confidence. Their rages, their tears, their moments of total dissolution, these belong to them and to the ritual space. I am merely the one who holds the space open long enough for the transformation to occur.
There is a Japanese concept called Ma, the space between things, the pause that gives meaning to what surrounds it. The silence between notes that makes the music possible. In traditional Japanese aesthetics, Ma is not emptiness but pregnant potential.
What I offer is Ma. Not a talking cure. Not a program with modules and outcomes. The space I create is physical, embodied, ritualized. It is populated with other humans whose presence creates friction and exposure. It is structured by practices that have been refined over centuries to produce specific effects on consciousness.
And it takes time. Not fifty minutes. Not a weekend workshop. The retreats I design for these clients last weeks or months. There is no spa menu, no schedule of treatments, no optimization of the experience. There is only the unfolding of what needs to unfold, at the pace it needs to unfold.
Most luxury wellness operates on the opposite principle. It optimizes. It schedules. It provides menus of options so the client always feels in control. My work removes all of that. The client does not know what will happen today. The client does not choose their practices or their partners. The client surrenders control, sometimes willingly, sometimes kicking and screaming, because that is the only way to reach what control has been hiding.
I am sometimes asked what qualifies me for this work. The question assumes that qualification comes from credentials, certifications, institutional recognition. I have none of these. What I have is a lineage, a transmission of practices from a tradition that has nearly vanished. What I have is twenty-five years of my own practice, my own dissolution, my own confrontation with what lives beneath the performance. What I have is a sensitivity that I did not ask for and cannot fully explain.
I see people. Not their personas, not their accomplishments, not their carefully managed self-presentations. I see the person underneath, usually within minutes of meeting them. I see what they are hiding and what the hiding is costing them. I see the shape of their suffering before they have spoken a word about it.
This is not a superpower. It is simply what happens when you have dissolved your own defenses enough that other people's defenses become visible. The persona is a kind of tension in the field. When you have learned to relax your own tension, you can feel other people's tension with great precision.
The wealthy often find this unsettling. They are used to being opaque, unreadable, in control of what others perceive. To be seen, truly seen, instantly, without the usual gradual revelation, is a violation of their privacy. And yet it is also, I think, a relief. Someone finally sees them. Not their money, not their power, not what they can do. Them.
This seeing is the beginning of the work. Everything else follows from it.
Let me describe one more thing. A moment I have witnessed repeatedly, in different forms, with different clients.
The practices have been going for days or weeks. The rage has come and gone. The emptiness has been inhabited. The client has dissolved and reconstituted and dissolved again. Something has shifted at a level too deep to name.
And then there is a moment, usually quiet, usually unremarkable from the outside, when I see absolute happiness cross their face. Not pleasure. Not satisfaction. Not the temporary high of accomplishment or acquisition. Something much simpler. A kind of light in the eyes that has nothing to do with circumstance.
They are not happy because something good has happened. They are happy because they have finally stopped performing happiness. They have stopped optimizing for happiness. They have stopped managing their emotional state to produce the appearance of having achieved happiness. They are simply present, without strategy, without defense, without the exhausting effort of being someone.
In that moment, the superiority is gone. The sense of being special, exceptional, more successful than others, this drops away. Not as humiliation but as liberation. They discover that they do not need to be superior. They do not need to be anything. They can simply be.
This is what I work toward. Not insight, not healing, not optimization of the self. Just this: a human being finally allowed to stop performing, to stop controlling, to stop. To discover what remains when all the strategies fall away.
What remains is always the same thing. Beneath the money and the power and the terror and the rage and the loneliness, what remains is someone who wants to love and be loved. That is all any of us are. The most powerful person in the room and the actor I brought in from a life of middle class poverty, in this one respect, they are identical. The wanting is the same. The wound is the same. The healing is the same.
My work is simply to create the conditions where this can finally be seen.
I do not advertise much. I do not have a website designed to convert visitors into clients. People find me mostly through networks I do not control, a word passed between people who trust each other, a recommendation made quietly, a name mentioned in a context where such names can be mentioned.
This is how it should be. The work I do cannot be marketed. It cannot be packaged as a product or scaled as a service. Each engagement is singular, designed for one person's specific situation, conducted in whatever location serves the work. There is no life hack program to purchase, no methodology to franchise.
What I offer is presence. Mine, and the presence of those I bring into the space. What I offer is practices that exist nowhere else, transmitted from a lineage that nearly died. What I offer is the willingness to see what others cannot see and to stay present with what emerges.
For those who control the world, or significant portions of it, this is often the one thing their resources cannot buy. They can buy comfort, expertise, optimization, management. They cannot simply hire someone who will see through all of it to the person underneath and then stay there, without flinching, while that person falls apart.
I stay. That is perhaps the simplest way to describe what I do. When everyone else in their lives is managing them, protecting them, optimizing them, performing for them, I stay. I witness. I hold the space. And eventually, what needs to emerge, emerges.
The controllers of the world are not different from anyone else. They are simply people whose defenses have become very sophisticated, very effective, very total. Beneath the defenses is the same human material, the same longing, the same grief, the same rage, the same love.
My work is to reach that material. And then to watch what happens when someone who has been controlling everything finally discovers they can stop.
They return to their lives afterward. The boards, the deals, the management of empires. From the outside, nothing may appear to have changed. They are still wealthy, still powerful, still operating at levels most people will never touch.
But something is different. The performance continues, because the performance is necessary. But they know now that it is a performance. They know what lives beneath it. They have seen their own face when the mask comes off, and the face was not monstrous. It was just human. Just wanting. Just here.
This knowing changes everything, even when it changes nothing visible. The grip loosens. The terror subsides. The loneliness, the particular loneliness of those who control the world, becomes, if not healed, then at least witnessed. They know now that someone has seen them. That they are not, after all, alone with what they carry.
This is what I offer. Not a cure. Not a solution. Not another optimization of the already optimized life. Just this: the experience of being seen, of stopping, of discovering what remains when the control falls away.